After the downfall

XIX

Lenello raiders went on harrying Bucovin's western villages all through the winter. They kept some of the towns they seized. That bothered Lord Zgomot, who said, "They are going to jump off from those places when they really pick up the war again come spring."

"Well, of course," Hasso said when word of the Lord of Bucovin's comment got to him through Drepteaza. He heard everything second- and third- and fifth-hand, when he heard of it at all.

"This is not what the Lenelli usually do," she said.

"I wonder why not," Hasso said. "Are they really so stupid? I did not think so when I was with them."

That got him summoned before Zgomot. "Did you give the blonds the idea of biting and holding on instead of biting and letting go?" the Lord of Zgomot demanded.

"I don't know, Lord," Hasso answered. "I don't think so. I don't remember talking about it with them, not like that. King Bottero just thinks one fast campaign will break Bucovin." Hasso had thought the same thing. Why not? He hadn't known any better. Hitler had thought the same thing about the Russians. Well, so much for that. So much for this, too.

"Maybe you made them think about the way wars are supposed to work," Lord Zgomot said. "Lavtrig knows you've done that with us. We don't see things the way we did before we caught you — all the gods know that's so."

Was that praise? Hasso supposed it was, though he suspected the Lord of Bucovin wasn't sure, either. "You were going to send out raiders, Lord," the German remembered. "Any luck with them?"

"Not much," Zgomot answered. "The border is… the border. Magic works there — it works just fine. We could not gain surprise."

"Ah." Hasso wondered whether this clever little Grenye would ask him to give the raiders some kind of sorcerous smoke screen. He thought he might be able to figure out how to do that. He wasn't a trained wizard, but he'd seen that he could make magic work.

But Zgomot asked him nothing of the sort. Hasso remembered what he'd heard about the natives and sorcery. A wizard who'd work magic for them would decide that, as the seeing man in the country of the blind, he ought to show them which way they should go. And, if they didn't feel like going that way, he would try to make them do it. No, their experience with sorcery was far from happy.

Instead, the Lord of Bucovin said, "Will we have enough gunpowder to fight the big blond bastards — excuse me, Hasso Pemsel: the big blond Lenello bastards — when they invade us this spring? Because they will — or do you doubt it?"

"No, Lord, I don't," Hasso answered. For a long time, Hitler had disguised his aggressive plans. Bottero didn't waste any time trying. The Lenelli were very direct in their dealings with Grenye. You have it. I want it. I'm going to take it.

"The gunpowder?" Zgomot prompted.

"Sorry, Lord. My thoughts go somewhere else. Yes, we should have enough. If their wizards figure out how to set it off at a distance, though… What we have then is trouble."

Lord Zgomot took that in stride. "When did Grenye have anything but trouble since the big blond bastards first washed ashore here? Never once. And there are all kinds of trouble, too. You know King Bottero is married to old King Iesi's daughter?"

Hasso knew Queen Pola came from the Lenello realm just north of Bottero's. He'd forgotten Iesi's name, if he ever knew it. But he could say, "Yes, Lord," without stretching things too far.

"Well, I hear Iesi may move east, too," the Lord of Bucovin said. "I don't know whether his army will come separately under his command or march along with King Bottero's in one big host. But they may move."

"If they come by themselves, we should hit them first," Hasso said.

"Oh? Why?"

"Because Bottero already knows some of my tricks," the German replied. "We can surprise Iesi and his men — or I hope we can, anyhow. If we drive him back, then we deal with Bottero." Try to deal with Bottero. But he kept that to himself.

"You don't think Bottero will have told Iesi about the kinds of things you do?" That will have told perplexed Hasso for a moment; he didn't hear a future perfect every day. Before he could answer, Zgomot took care of it for him: "No, of course he won't. If he ever had to fight Iesi or one of the other blond kings, he would want to be able to give him a surprise. Fair enough. If Iesi comes by himself, we try to hit him first and knock him out of the fight."

He might be mindblind, but he was nobody's fool. Neither was Bottero, come to that. If you were going to make a halfway decent king, brains were an asset.

"Do you let me fight your enemies, Lord?" Hasso shook his head in exasperation. He felt mindblind himself, fighting with languages he didn't speak well enough. "Will you let me fight your enemies, Lord?"

Zgomot looked pained. Hasso knew things he didn't and could do things he couldn't. That made the Wehrmacht officer valuable. It made using him necessary and losing him unfortunate. It also made him dangerous. As if that weren't obvious enough anyway, Hasso came in a large, blond package.

"I do not want you hurt." The Lord of Bucovin picked his words with care. You didn't want to offend the captive genie, lest it turn on you. After gnawing at the inside of his lower lip for a moment, Zgomot added, "I do not want to take the chance that you will desert to the Lenelli again, either."

He must have decided that Hasso could see that he could see the possibility. It was, in the mildest possible way, a compliment. It was one Hasso could have done without. "If you don't trust me to fight, why do you trust me to make gunpowder for you?" he asked. "Maybe I blow the palace to the sky." He'd thought about it.

"Maybe you will," Zgomot said steadily. "My thinking is, you are less likely to do that if you stay inside the palace yourself."

Hasso gave him a crooked grin. "My thinking is, you're right." He remembered Russians who'd killed without caring for their own lives. Before things really fell to pieces in the Reich, the papers had stories about Japanese pilots who flew their airplanes into American warships. Hasso admired their courage without wanting to emulate it. He liked living. Dying at the age of 103, shot by an outraged husband, struck him as a good way to go.

"This also strikes me as one more reason to keep you where you are," Zgomot said.

Damn! Hasso thought. He could see why it would strike the Lord of Bucovin that way. "How do I persuade you that you can trust me?" he asked.

Zgomot gave him the courtesy of taking the question seriously. He didn't answer right away, but plucked at his beard as he thought things over. "If you fight well against Bottero's men," he said at last, "that may convince me."

"If you don't let me fight against Bottero's men, how am I supposed to fight well?" Hasso inquired, less acidulously than he might have.

Zgomot stroked his chin again. His eyes twinkled — or maybe it was just a trick of the light. "It is," he admitted, "a puzzlement."

Iesi didn't move. Bottero kept moving. He worked more methodically than he had during the autumn. That invasion had been a blow aimed at Bucovin's heart. When it failed to reach Falticeni — when it failed, period — the Lenelli pulled back to their own border.

Now Bottero was trying something different. He was taking one town, making sure he had it, and then going on to the next. Making sure he had a town involved either massacring the local Grenye or chasing them off to the east with no more than the clothes on their backs. Some of the women didn't even get those.

As news of what the Lenelli were doing and how they were doing it came to Falticeni, Lord Zgomot's face got longer and longer. His own people had to be screaming at him to do something. How long would he stay Lord of Bucovin if he didn't?

What'll happen to me if Bucovin gets a new lord? Hasso wondered. He feared it wouldn't be good. He also feared Zgomot would order him to use gunpowder against the Lenelli, and he didn't think the time was ripe.

If you have trouble, attack from an unexpected direction. That maxim had served the Germans — especially Manstein — well in Russia.

So Hasso decided he'd better take the initiative with Zgomot before Zgomot took it with him. "Lord, you are in touch with a lot of Grenye inside Bottero's kingdom, is it not so?" he asked.

"Yes, of course it is so," Zgomot answered impatiently — his temper was fraying round the edges, something Hasso hadn't seen from him before. "You ought to know it is so, outlander. If what you told me is true, you did your best to keep them from doing Bucovin any good, and your best was better than I wish it were. So why do you want to know now?"

"Can you touch them off?" Now that Hasso had gunpowder, he could use figures of speech based on it. He hadn't realized how many of those there were till he had to do without them. "If the peasants blow up behind Bottero's line, he'll need to leave Bucovin alone to deal with them."

"Gods help them when he does," Zgomot said. Hasso only shrugged. The Lord of Bucovin sent him a measuring stare. "You're as cold-blooded as a serpent, aren't you, Hasso Pemsel?"

With another shrug, Hasso said, "If I serve Bucovin, I have to think of Bucovin first, yes?"

"Yes… if you serve Bucovin." Zgomot didn't mean it the same way Hasso had.

Well, he had his reasons for doubting the German. His biggest reason likely was that Hasso looked like a Lenello. Besides, Hasso was fighting on King Bottero's side when the Bucovinans captured him. The Lord of Bucovin wouldn't forget it, or that Hasso had been boffing the goddess on earth. None of that would inspire confidence, not from Zgomot's point of view. All right, maybe my looks aren't the biggest reason, Hasso thought. But they sure aren't the smallest one, either.

Back to business now. "What I tell you to do probably does hurt King Bottero," Hasso said. "I don't see how it can hurt Bucovin. A lot of Grenye in Bottero's kingdom aren't even Bucovinans."

"I should hope not. They belong to the small tribes, the weak tribes," Zgomot said. Bucovinans had almost as much scorn for the Grenye who'd quickly succumbed to the invaders from overseas as Lenelli did for Grenye in general. But the Lord of Bucovin continued, "Even if they are ruined men, I hate to throw them into the fire. They are still of our blood, of our flesh."

"What good does it do them if Bucovin falls?" Hasso asked.

Zgomot grunted. "A point, no doubt. I do not know how much good an uprising will do us, but I do not suppose it can hurt. And you are right, of course — we have ways of making one happen."

If the border was as tightly held as Hasso had tried to arrange, it wouldn't be so easy to sneak into Bottero's realm. He'd tried to make it hard for Grenye to sneak out of the Lenello kingdom, though; he hadn't worried about any of them sneaking in. He thought he would have, sooner or later, but he hadn't yet. So many different things going on…

And how much attention would Bottero's marshals and wizards pay to his advice now that he wasn't in Drammen anymore? How much attention would they pay now that he'd gone over to the other side? They would probably do the opposite of anything he'd ever proposed, just on general principles.

If he aimed to return to the Lenelli's good graces, he'd find some magical way to get in touch with Aderno and warn him the uprising was coming. Could he manage to touch the wizard in his dreams? Maybe he could. He whistled softly. Talk about playing both ends against the middle!

Next question was, did he want to try anything like that? He fit in better in Drammen than he did in Falticeni, no doubt about it. But fitting in better wasn't the same as fitting in well — no doubt about that, either. And Aderno and Velona had both done their level best to kill him, which didn't encourage him to try to do anything nice for them.

If I could get Velona back again… Any man would do almost anything to have a woman like that. But it wouldn't be the same as it was. He could see as much, however much he wished he couldn't. And, except for Velona, he had no overwhelming reasons to prefer the Lenelli to the Grenye.

I look right among the Lenelli. There was the other side of Zgomot's worrying about his loyalty because he was big and blond. It did matter, but only so much. He was a foreigner in Bottero's kingdom, too, even if a less obvious foreigner.

Grenye women are homely. Much of that went back to Velona again. Velona would have been a knockout — a knockout and a half — anywhere. Next to her, most Lenello women were homely, too; Hasso wouldn't have wanted to end up in bed with Queen Pola for all the tea in China. He did think the average Lenello woman was prettier than the average Grenye.

Drepteaza… He muttered to himself. No matter what he thought of Drepteaza, she didn't think much of him. She thought he looked like a goddamn Lenello, was what she thought. And there he was, banging head-on into looks again.

"You're thinking hard." Zgomot startled him out of his none too happy reverie.

"Yes, Lord." Hasso couldn't very well deny it.

"You don't say much," the Lord of Bucovin remarked.

"My head is full of mud," Hasso answered. "I don't have much worth saying."

"No, eh?" Zgomot didn't believe him, but seemed too polite to push about it. Since Hasso hadn't told the whole truth, that was just as well. Zgomot lifted an imaginary mug. "May you bring as much confusion to our enemies."

"May it be so." Did Hasso mean it? He decided he didn't want to try to reach Aderno in his dreams, so maybe he did.

When Scanno was sober, he remembered he was a fighting man. He liked to practice with Hasso. "Now I can pick on somebody my own size," he said. He was bigger than the German, too, but only a little. When they used wooden practice swords, he did pick on Hasso. Even half-drunk, which he was a lot of the time, he was better with a blade than the Wehrmacht officer ever would be.

"How old were you the first time you picked up a sword?" Hasso asked, rubbing his ribcage where one of Scanno's strokes had got through. He would have an ugly bruise there tonight.

The renegade shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "Two, three, maybe four. If you're going to be a warrior, you need to be a warrior. You start learning how as soon as you can."

That was true among the Prussian Junkers, too, but not to the same degree. Learning to shoot a rifle — especially a modern one, with a flat trajectory and good sights — was a lot easier than learning to fence and ride. Hand-to-hand combat in Hasso's world was nice to know, but you needed it a lot less than you did here.

"Let's try spears," Hasso said. The Bucovinans used shafts with rags padding the end, the same as the Lenelli did. Had they come up with the idea on their own or borrowed it from the blonds? Hasso wondered whether even the locals knew any more.

He could hold his own with spears. That made him feel better about himself and his place here. Moral — don't get caught with just a sword, he thought. Though the day was chilly, he and Scanno worked up a good sweat thrusting and parrying.

Scanno swigged from a big mug of beer. "Can't sweat all the good stuff out of me," he said, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. He took another pull at the mug. "Now I suppose you'll want to thump my sorry ass."

"You give me fencing lessons. Shouldn't I give you wrestling lessons?" Hasso hoped he sounded more innocent than he felt — he did want some of his own back. "If you're going to be a warrior, you need to be a warrior. Who says — said — that? Somebody who looks a lot like you."

"Me and my big mouth." Scanno gave a crooked — and rather slack-lipped — grin. "All right. Let's get it over with. You can throw me around like a sack of beans."

Hasso did, too. He also got thrown around some himself, even if Scanno wasn't so quick learning the new moves as Orosei had been. But then, Orosei was the king's master-at-arms, and Scanno never more than middling good. He might have learned faster had he stayed sober more, but he might have done all kinds of things had he stayed sober more.

At one point in the proceedings, he landed on his head. He didn't move for close to a minute afterwards. Hasso eyed him in some alarm — he hadn't intended to throw him that hard. You didn't want to hurt anybody while you trained, but accidents happened every now and then.

Just when the German was about to see whether artificial respiration would do any good, Scanno rolled over, sat up, shook his head, and winced. "Got to make my eyes uncross there," he said.

"Sorry," Hasso told him. "I didn't mean to do that."

"Shit happens." Scanno shrugged, then winced again. "Don't think I got hit so hard since I ran into a dragon's skull."

"Right," Hasso said. Scanno was full of figures of speech for a hangover. He hadn't heard that one before, but he liked it.

"Wait. Wait." Scanno shook his head once more, despite the horrible face he pulled as soon as he did it. "You think I'm talking about being drunk, don't you? I really did run into a dragon's skull. Came cursed close to killing myself doing it, too." He got to his feet. It took some effort, but he managed.

Hasso steadied him. "Well, all right. That sounds like a story worth hearing."

"I know what you mean. You mean you won't believe a bloody word of it," the renegade said. That was exactly what Hasso meant, but he didn't feel like admitting it. Scanno went over to his mug of beer and upended it. Hasso didn't think he could have drunk so much at a single draught, but he hadn't had Scanno's practice. "This was probably about twenty years ago, you understand."

"Sure," Hasso said. A lot of things could change in twenty years. Twenty years ago, Hitler was probably just about getting out of jail and publishing Mein Kampf. The Weimar Republic still ruled Germany, whose army was just big enough to blow its own nose, and maybe to sneeze if it got permission from France and Poland first. The shackles of the Treaty of Versailles still held the country down. Hitler'd thrown them off, all right, just the way he promised he would… and started down the path that would wreck the Reich far more completely than Versailles did.

"I was hunting deer in a noble's forest — you know how it is," Scanno said.

"Poaching." Hasso knew just how it was.

"Yeah. You better believe it, buddy." Scanno's grin was utterly without self-consciousness — or guilt. "I needed the venison a demon of a lot more than that rich bastard did, too. My backbone was rubbing against my belly, and there aren't many feelings worse'n that one."

"Tell me about it." Hasso had been hungry more than he cared to remember on the Eastern Front. Who hadn't?

"Uh-huh." Scanno took hunger for granted, too. In this world, one bad harvest meant people went hungry. Two bad harvests in a row meant famine. Scanno continued, "So there I was, where the law said I wasn't supposed to be. Right at the beginning of summer, you know, when everything's all green and grown and luscious — me and my bow, sneaking through the woods." He grinned again, relishing the memory.

"So you run into a dragon then?" Hasso said. "I hear about one in King Cherso's realm — what was it, three years gone by now?"

"I heard about that one, too. Never saw it, 'cause it never came this far south, goddess be praised." Scanno still swore by the Lenello divinity, then. That was interesting, or might be. "Yeah, I ran into a dragon, all right, only not quite the way you think."

"Tell me more," Hasso urged. Scanno could spin a yarn, all right. How much of it to believe… Well, you could always figure that out later.

Before going on, Scanno refilled the mug from a pitcher. "Can't hardly talk with a dry throat," he remarked, and poured down another good draught. After what he'd drunk, Hasso wouldn't have been able to walk, but the Lenello seemed to need more even to feel a buzz. "Where was I?"

"In the woods, running into a dragon."

"Oh, yeah. I spotted this buck — a big old fat buck. Nice antlers on him, too, if you care about that kind of crap. Me, I was after meat. He was upwind of me, so my scent didn't give me away. I did the best sneak ever — I mean ever — till I got close enough to draw and let fly. Hit the bastard, too." He quaffed again.

"Then what happened?" Yes, Hasso was hooked in spite of himself.

"You know how it is. Only way you can kill clean is through the eye or maybe through the heart if you're lucky. I got him maybe a palm's breadth back of the heart. He was gonna die, and die pretty cursed quick, but not right there, worse luck. He took off running, and I took off running after him. I didn't want to lose him. You better believe I didn't — he would've kept me eating for days and days."

"How did you run into the dragon, then?" Hasso asked.

"How? With my head, that's how. I was crashing through the bushes after the stag, and I tried crashing through one and crashed into the dragon's skull instead. The bushes had grown up so you couldn't see the bones — I guess all that dead dragon made good manure for them. I went wham! Next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, and quite a while had gone by."

"How could you…? Oh. The sun." Hasso felt foolish. He was used to wrist-watches and clocks and always knowing just what time it was. Getting accustomed to slower, more approximate timekeeping hadn't been easy.

Scanno nodded. "That's right. I woke up with a demon of a headache, and with a goose's egg right between my eyes. If I was going a little bit faster, I bet I would've broken my stupid head. I got up — that took some doing, too — and I found what I'd run into."

"What about the buck?" Hasso asked.

"Gone," Scanno said mournfully. "I lost the blood trail the other side of those bushes hiding the skeleton. The headache I had, I lost my appetite, too, but I knew that would come back sooner or later. I didn't quite starve, or I wouldn't be here now, right?"

"Right," Hasso said. "It's a good story."

"But you don't believe a word of it."

"I didn't say that."

"Like you needed to." Scanno drew out something on a thong from under his tunic. Lots of Lenelli and Grenye wore amulets of one kind or another. Scanno's was plainer than most: a fragment of what looked like bone, drilled through so it would take the leather thong. "This is dragon skull. I worried it off with my knife. Hard like anything — I had to hone the blade afterwards."

"All right." For all Hasso knew, the bit of bone came from a donkey. He didn't want to argue with Scanno, though. What was the use? He couldn't prove the Lenello renegade was lying.

Or maybe he could, if he could master the truth spell Aderno had used. Would it work here in Falticeni? Most magic seemed to falter here. And Aderno's spell, for that matter, had faltered against Scanno back in Drammen.

Instead of experimenting with sorcery, Hasso asked, "Do you want to throw me around for a while?"

"Sure!" Scanno said eagerly, and he did.

Hasso used the baths in the palace almost every day. Scanno laughed at him for that; the Lenelli were a less cleanly folk than the Bucovinans. Hasso took the ribbing and ignored it. He'd been clean and he'd been dirty, and he liked clean better. Besides, even with the drafts, the bathhouse had to be the warmest room in the palace.

Rautat noticed his habits, too. "One more thing that says you really aren't one of those people, even if you look like them," the veteran underofficer remarked as he scrubbed in a hot pool of an afternoon. His scars weren't puckered craters like Hasso's; they were long, pale lines on his dark skin.

"I'm me, that's all," Hasso answered. They were both using Bucovinan. Hasso had got to the point where he could follow it pretty well. He spoke more hesitantly.

"Yeah, well, you aren't so bad." Rautat ducked his head under the water and came up blowing like a porpoise.

"Thanks." Hasso submerged, too.

When he came up, a couple of women were walking past, heading for another pool. They chatted idly, paying Rautat no attention and Hasso hardly any; people in the palace were used to him by now. Neither of them wore any more than she'd been born with. The Bucovinans were easy in their skins, easier than the Lenelli and much easier than any Germans except a few resolute naturists.

Back in Germany, Hasso had always thought those people were nuts. When he landed in a country where everybody took nudity in stride, he had to think again. He'd been doing nothing but thinking again since he landed in this world. What was one more time?

He did notice that, just as he tried not to bathe while Drepteaza was in there, she also found ways not to come in while he was. If she was already washing when he came in, she hurried to get out. If he got there before her, she would wait till he finished.

She didn't seem angry at him, not when they met for language lessons or to talk about gunpowder and other things he knew and the natives didn't. Maybe she thought he wasn't just seeing her nude — he was seeing her naked. If that was what was going on — he didn't want to come right out and ask her — he admired her tact. He also admired her for understanding that foreigners had different ways of looking at things, whether literally or metaphorically.

And, if that was what she thought, she was dead right.

He wished she were interested. Laying Grenye women who gave themselves to him because they were supposed to was better than not laying anybody. But he remembered Velona too well. After going to bed with her, the natives didn't seem like anything special. And, except as convenient bodies, he didn't care much about Leneshul or Gishte.

Drepteaza would be different — he was sure of that. It wasn't just that she was prettier than they were. She was smarter and livelier and…

And she wasn't interested in him.

You can't have too much of what you don't want. Somebody'd said that where Hasso could hear it, and he thought it was true. Screwing the Grenye women gave him physical relief, yes indeed. But it wasn't what he wanted, so every time he did it he felt emptier inside.

Yeah, Drepteaza would be different. He was sure she would… except he was what she didn't want. He wasn't a Lenello. No matter what he was, he looked like one. For the priestess, the way he looked was plenty.

Not wanting somebody because of how he looked — wasn't that surprising, not really. Hasso had judged plenty of people by their looks — Frenchmen (and — women), Jews, Ivans, Poles. It was much less enjoyable when other people judged him.

"You worked in Drammen, you say," he said to Rautat, there in the baths. Anything was better than brooding about all the reasons Drepteaza wanted nothing to do with him.

"That's right." Rautat nodded, water dripping off his chin and the end of his nose. "Wanted to pick up the lingo, wanted to learn things the Lenelli know and we don't. Did it, too, and came home."

"What do you think of Lenelli, then?" Hasso asked.

"Bunch of big blond pricks," Rautat said promptly. "No offense."

"Yeah, sure," Hasso said. They both grinned.

"Well, it's the truth. They treat Grenye like donkey turds in the street," Rautat said. "And the Grenye there, some of them are so beaten down, they feel like they deserve to get treated that way, poor sorry bastards. If they try to stand up, they get knocked down. Is it any wonder so many of 'em stay plastered all the time? I guess it doesn't get to you so much that way."

"What about Lenello women?" No, Hasso couldn't stay away from the sore spot.

"Big blond cows," Rautat replied. "Who wants a gal taller than he is?"

Velona was damn near as tall as Hasso. He thought he would have wanted her if she were three meters tall. Whether she would have wanted him then, of course, was a different story. And Queen Pola was almost as tall as he was, too, and he didn't want her for beans. If she were fifteen or twenty centimeters taller than he was, she would have made him want to run away.

"Maybe you have something there," he said.

"You better believe it." Like any good underofficer, Rautat was sure of himself. "I guess Lenello women are all right for you, 'cause you're a big blond guy yourself." He didn't say big blond prick again, which was something. "But me, I pick on somebody my own size." Hasso thought that was what the idiom meant, anyhow; it might have been bawdier.

He didn't want to leave the baths. Before long, it would be spring, and then summer. Bucovin would warm up. But it wasn't warm now, even if Velona had been right: it didn't get as cold as Russia.

Dammit, he couldn't get her out of his head. He didn't want to be one of those men who spent years mooning after a lost lover and never did get on with their lives. He didn't want to, no, but he didn't know what he could do about it. He'd really and truly fallen in love with her.

She'd warned him not to. How were you supposed to listen to a warning like that, though? If you were a male human being, how could you help falling hard for a gorgeous, sexy woman who screwed like there was no tomorrow?

Velona had warned of worse than a broken heart, but that was bad enough. But not many women — none he knew of except her — could have come so close to frying his potatoes for him when she was in Drammen and he was in Falticeni. And yet…

If I got back to Bottero's kingdom and Velona took me back, would I be happy? Would I want to pick up where we left off? As soon as he asked the question, he saw the answer. Bet your ass I would.

It wouldn't be the same, though. Oh, maybe for her it would. She wouldn't have changed any — well, a little, or she wouldn't take him back no matter what. But he'd spent as much time by now in Bucovin as he had in Bottero's realm. He'd seen the other side of the hill. And, like Scanno, he'd seen things weren't quite so simple as most Lenelli thought.

Velona and Bottero and the rest of the colonists from across the sea thought Grenye were little and ugly and stupid and mindblind — the last two weren't the same, but each amplified the other. And they thought that, because of all those things, they could push the Grenye aside like so many animals, domesticating some and killing the rest and using the land they took any way they pleased.

Well, the Grenye were little. No matter what Rautat thought, Hasso liked Lenello looks better. As far as he knew, the natives were mindblind… but so were almost all of the big blonds.

Dammit, the Grenye were people. Some of them were stupid, but so were some Lenelli. Lord Zgomot and Drepteaza were as smart as anybody he'd run into in Drammen. Did they deserve to get pushed to the wall?

Hasso wondered why he hadn't wondered about any of that stuff when he rolled into Russia in a halftrack on 22 June 1941. The Ivans turned out to be as smart as anybody else, too. Did they ever! Hitler should have spent more time wondering about that stuff, too.

"The other side of the hill…" Hasso muttered.

"What's that? More of your language?" Rautat asked, which made him realize he'd slipped into German. "What does it mean?" the Bucovinan went on.

"It means I see Drammen, and I see Falticeni, too," Hasso answered. "I get to know Drammen and Falticeni both."

"Well, so have I," Rautat said. "So have lots of Bucovinans. Not so many Lenelli here — some like Scanno, and some traders, and some spies. Most of them just want to get as much from us as they can. They don't give a turd what we want." He cocked his head to one side, as he had a way of doing. "I used to figure you were like that. Now I'm not so sure. Sometimes you act like a human being."

There it was again — somebody who speaks our language. And they were still speaking Bucovinan. Hasso managed a wry smile. "Well, I try."

"Yeah, I know," Rautat said seriously. "Not a fart of a lot of big blond pricks who do." He gave back a smile that matched the German's. "Like I always say, no offense."

"Tell me another one, you little prick," Hasso retorted — little dark prick just didn't sound right. Rautat splashed him. He splashed back. They ducked each other and raised hell like a couple of six-year-olds. Hasso had never imagined having fun in Falticeni, but this sure felt like it.